Monday, August 20, 2007

My Bloody Valentine - Isn't Anything

I'm really tired right now. Sorry that I didn't update yesterday. I had to help my friends move into an apartment in Chicago. After we were done I just sort of sat there and realized how old we were all getting. A bunch of kids from Batavia finally making it on our own.

I live in Dekalb now, at least for the year. I don't really consider myself anything but a Batavian though. All my important stuff is still there. I think a man's residence is where his CD collection is. My CDs are all still in Batavia. I will still buy all my CDs in Batavia. It was just a simple handshake between my dad and a hug from my mom when i left. Completely appropriate for these circumstances, there was none of that "my little boy is growing up" bullshit because I really haven't grown up at all. I didn't move out my CDs because I know I'm going back there, the day I move my albums to a different residence, well, that means I'll have become a man.

One of the albums I did bring to Dekalb was this one. It's one of my favorite albums of all time. Why? Because of the fuckin' songs. My Bloody Valentine were always a really noisy shoegaze band bent on global domination. Ambience, walls of guitars and all that, but I really just enjoy them way more when they're writing really guitar-heavy pop songs like the ones on here. "Feed me With Your Kiss" and "Cupid Come" are two of the greatest songs I've ever heard. Maybe they don't quite match the understated, fuzzy, brilliance of "When You Sleep" off of Loveless(their anti-pop album, which ironically hosts the poppiest song they ever did), but it certainly comes close.

Rating: One of the greatest albums of all time, no, really! It's just a shame that the T.V. that my roommate is watching is turned up so loud. I can't hear it as well as I'd like to. The funny thing is, I have more personal shit connected to Loveless, but I still like this one better. Loveless isn't really that good of an album, but I have such a connection to it personally, it fits into a certain time of my life, just like favorite records tend to do. Isn't Anything is just nothing more than one of the most brilliant guitar albums ever written. I haven't made that personal connection to it quite yet. Maybe it's day will come when it will soundtrack something for me, until then, I'll just jam to it on my first of many nights at 501 college ave.

6 comments:

I gave paves a written fellating with his last post, now its your turn. This is a really good personal write-up about a (soon to be, it seems) personally compelling album. I'm gonna listen to MBV right now.

I bought this album the same week that Ii started working at a video store in 1999 or something. The store was just opening for the first time, and they'd bought their entire collection from some other store that had gone out of business. So for a week, my only job was to remove the stickers with the old store's name on it and replace them with new stickers with this store's name on it. It was all really old VHS tapes of awful 80s comedy and horror movies, all in those oversized boxes, sun-faded and damaged beyond the point where they ever should have been displayed, but that didn't stop them from goin on the shelves anyway. it was also the first store in our town that had porn ("adult" videos, as I was told to call them time and time again), which I never watched myself but restocked almost every day. The only title I remember was "wet cotton panties" and I think there were several volumes of that. I think that most video to rent but the adult videos were $4 or something. That didn't stop guys from going and renting 5...6...7 of them at a time, the same guys, night after night. It was astounding, but that's probably what it's like whereever they rent porn videos, assuming they even do that stuff anymore. My coworkers were the worst group of kids: there was that high school kid that sat on the counter and acted sarcastic to all the customers. Some girl that, on her last day, told me she was leaving early and ran out the door 4 hours early -- later we found out the cash register was missing $50. And then there was the bass player for [local band] who peeled the labels off of kids videos and put them onto porn tapes. I don't know what he was hoping this would accomplish, maybe some kind of Clerks-like hijinx would ensue, I don't know. 8 years later, despite the fact that I lived right next to him, rode the school bus with him in high school, and worked with him for a summer at this job, he had no idea who I was when I ran into him again at his record store job. Oh well. Anyway, the store is out of business, but that's what you get when you try to start a video store one year after DVDs come out... it's a losing game.